Never walk alone...

You have used Vim for so long, and you have it so ingrained within you, that when somebody suggests you use other editor you instinctively reply “over my dead body!”. I know how you feel.

And then one day you start programming in Common Lisp; everybody says that you must use Emacs with SLIME; and after not so long you actually start considering switching to it!

The horrors!

I believe that for some long-time Vim users, switching to Emacs is not an easy option. Personally I’m afraid of immersing into Emacs, spending countless hours learning its ways and idiosyncrasies, without gaining any significant advantage over Vim. Those countless hours could be better spend immersing yourself into learning Common Lisp (or something else).

In this article I’ll show you how I’m using Vim to develop applications with Common Lisp.

If you are creating a similar presentation feel free to take whatever you want from my slides. I hereby authorize You to do whatever the hell you want with the content referred to above. Except that I took some parts from other places (always showing a link to the original source). If you use something from those parts you should include the link to the original sources as well.

Eric Sink on the Business of Software
Eric Sink
Apress (March 20, 2006)

This is a book targeted to people (more specifically, programmers) who are thinking about starting a software business, or are working in a startup or small software business.

The author is the founder of SourceGear, an Illinois based company which develops and sells version control tools for developers, and through his own experiences he shows us the lessons he has learned; many times by making a lot of mistakes.

This is a really good book for newcomers to Common Lisp, however take note that this is not a book for beginning programmers. This book will not guide you on the details of how to get, install and launch a Common Lisp environment. If you don’t feel able to do that on your own then this book might not be for you.

If you are starting to learn Common Lisp, and have already read the chapter about “Cons” from an introductory book (also called cons cells), then you could try the following exercise. How to represent a tree using nothing but conses; and abstract that implementation with functions to create and traverse the tree.

PLEASE NOTE, that if you need to represent trees in a production program you shouldn’t use lists as described here unless you have a good reason. This is only an exercise in understanding how cons cells work.

Many people use OpenSSH to connect to a remote machine, but many don’t know that you can actually do other interesting things with it, other than just opening a remote login shell. In this article I’ll show you a few of them.

There’s only 4 days left before I fly to Chicago to attend the PyCon 2008 conference, the biggest event for the Python community. This will be the second time that I go to PyCon, last year the conference was held in Addison Texas and I really had a great time, I met cool people, visited a few restaurants and learned interesting things about Python.

Here are some photos that I took last year, and you can see more on my flickr set:

In this post I explain how I made my wireless card with a Realtek RTL8185 chipset work in Slackware GNU/Linux.

I recently moved to a new apartment and the Internet modem had to be placed in the bedroom, separate from the living room where I have my workstation, so I had to choose between buying a wireless card for my pc or drilling a hole through the wall to slip in an ethernet cable.

Since I don’t have a drill, and my wife wouldn’t have liked a cable going through the middle of the makeup mirror, I got an Encore Electronics Wireless-G PCI Adapter (ENLWI-G2). Actually this is just a card with a Realtek RTL8185 chipset on it, and you can get the Linux drivers from the Realtek website.